The Age of Gold (25 page)

The Mormon mapmaker was an experienced hand in the desert and mountains. He advised the Royces to camp at the meadows for two or three days, to let the cattle rest and graze freely. Meanwhile the party should cut grass and load it into the wagon, along with water to the top of every container they possessed. If the days were relatively cool, they should set out across the desert at noon; if hot, they should wait until evening. But in either case the larger part of the journey must occur at night. They should stop every few hours to feed, water, and rest the cattle. In this way they would be able to reach the Carson River within twenty-four hours of leaving the sink.

“After hearing his instructions, and having the road made thus plain to us, we went on with renewed cheerfulness and energy,” Sarah recorded.
The energy carried them down the lower Humboldt to its final disappearance in the sand. This late in the season, the river expired just before reaching what in the springtime was Humboldt Lake, a shallow body of water spanning some ten miles.

But here an almost lethal confusion crept into their thinking. Conventional wisdom on the trail—as they had interpreted it—described the sink itself as being at the foot of the dry lake, where, they were told, several holes had been dug. This placed it about ten miles beyond the point where the river, in early October, literally sank into the ground.

Accordingly, when they reached the literal current sink, they gauged they had thirteen miles to go till the point where the Mormon trace trailed off to the left, leading to the Mormon meadow. They decided to stop for the night and leave very early the next morning, to reach the meadow before the heat of the day.

At two o’clock they awoke, brewed coffee over a sagebrush fire, finished the last of the previous day’s rabbit pot-pie—the result of a rare success with a gun—and set off. The moonlight cast an ethereal glow across the barren landscape. Between the uncertain light and her overall weariness, Sarah began to see things that weren’t there.

Dawn dispelled the mirages, and caused Sarah and Josiah to seek anxiously for the holes that would mark the Humboldt Sink. It was nearly noon before they reached them. The holes contained some brackish water, which
they couldn’t bring themselves to drink straight. They kindled another sage fire (one of the few saving graces of the desert was the ready tinder it provided), boiled the water for coffee, and gulped it down disguised. Then they hurried on, expecting to find the Mormon trace on the left at a distance of two or three miles; in less than six miles they would be at the meadow.

They traveled for an hour, with no sign of the trace. Then another hour, and still no sign. Another hour, and another, and another. Night was falling, with no Mormon trace and no Mormon meadow. In every direction they looked, they saw only desert—dry, barren, deadly.

With a sickening feeling, Sarah and the others realized their mistake. The sink the Mormons spoke of was the one where the river actually disappeared—ten miles before the holes that marked what the Royces thought was the sink. In the dark of the previous night, they had passed the Mormon trace without seeing it. Now they were far out upon the desert leading to the Carson River, but without a single mouthful of grass for the oxen, and with only a few quarts of water in a small cask.

What to do? Every instinct said go forward. They must be nearly halfway across the desert. If they could hold on for several more hours, twelve at most, they must reach the Carson River, and the desert would be behind them. As always, the calendar drove them forward; every day on the desert exposed them to greater risk in the mountains that still separated them from California.

But the animals were worn to the edge of existence. They had neither eaten nor drunk for many hours. While their masters debated what to do, they were collapsing in harness. Without food and water, they would never make it across the desert. And without them, their masters would soon perish.

All the rest of the night, Sarah and Josiah weighed their options. The next day Josiah and one of two young men who had joined them for the crossing ascended a hill a mile away, in hopes of finding something on the horizon to give them guidance. The horizon yielded nothing. Meanwhile Sarah, to keep the cattle from expiring, ripped open some mattresses in the wagon and fed the animals the bedstraw, handful by precious handful.

The answer to their dilemma had become inescapable. They must turn
back and find the Mormon meadow. Yet though inescapable, this answer was almost unbearable. “Turn back!” Sarah wrote.

Yet turning back was no guarantee of safety. The cattle grew weaker with each mile, prompting Sarah to get out of the wagon and walk, to lighten the load. She refused to drink, sparing the water for Mary and the others. She slipped into a trance, unsure which part of what she saw was real and which part hallucination. Biblical images filled her head.

As the sun bore down upon them, Sarah prayed for some sign, some reason to hope that her baby wouldn’t die in this desolate land. They passed through an area where the sagebushes were closer together than usual; in recent days, Indians or emigrants had camped there. Leftover embers apparently had set the sage smoldering, and as Sarah walked by, a few wisps of old smoke curled heavenward. Suddenly, just in front of her, a bush burst into flame. Hot and bright, the fire raced through the branches of the
bush before burning itself out. Only ashes and a smoldering trunk remained. “It was a small incident, easily accounted for, but to my then overwrought fancy it made more vivid the illusion of being a wanderer in a far-off, old time desert, and myself witnessing a wonderful phenomenon. For a few moments I stood with bowed head worshiping the God of Horeb, and I was strengthened thereby.”

The sun began to sink behind them; the horned heads of the oxen drooped lower and lower till their noses scraped the sand with each weary step. And then, from a hundred yards in front, came the cheers of the two young men. “Grass and water!” they shouted. They had found the Mormon meadow. For now at least, the God of Hagar and Horeb—and Joseph Smith—had preserved this small wandering tribe.

For the rest of that day and all the next the travelers let the animals drink, eat, and recover. The men cut grass while Sarah repacked the wagon to make more room for the men’s cuttings. On the following day the party set off west. “The feeling that we were once more going forward, instead of backward, gave an animation to every step which we could never have felt but by contrast.” The change of direction was lost on the animals, which needed more rest and recuperation than they had received at the meadow. Sarah allowed herself to nap in the wagon; she woke to hear her husband speaking to one of the oxen: “So you’ve given out, have you, Tom?” Sarah looked out to discover Tom prostrate on the ground. Josiah unhitched him, and likewise his partner in harness, almost equally far gone. With a gesture of thanks for having drawn them so far and so faithfully, their masters left them to die. Four animals now pulled what had strained six. Sarah guiltily resolved to walk the rest of the way. “Nothing could induce me to get into the wagon again.”

As darkness fell they entered the worst of the desert. No moon illumined the path, but the shimmering starlight revealed more than the travelers cared to see. The carcasses of cattle lined the road, increasing in number with the miles. Presently a pair of abandoned wagons came into view. The owners, evidently despairing of reaching the Carson with their vehicles, had loaded the absolute essentials onto the few animals that could yet walk, and pushed ahead.

Farther on, the ruin of human dreams touched Sarah in a special way. Grand Conestoga wagons, employed by traders to haul merchandise, towered against the canopy of the stars, looking as tall as houses. They carried—or
had
carried—all manner of merchandise, of which the remnants were now strewn about the desert floor. Pasteboard boxes, wrapping paper, trunks and chests, pamphlets and books reminded Sarah of home even as they reminded her how far from home she was.

The cumulative effect of one wreck after another was profoundly discouraging. “We seemed to be but the last, little, feeble, struggling band at the rear of a routed army,” Sarah recalled.

The remaining oxen could be moved only by baiting: by holding grass before their noses and making them walk to receive it. The water ran out shortly before daylight, foretelling an imminent end to the animals, and to the humans not long thereafter. The cattle were too tired to complain; neither did the humans speak. Instead Sarah and the others constantly scanned the horizon, seeking any change in the flat, forbidding aspect, any sign that this terrible waste didn’t stretch to the ends of the earth.

Finally Sarah saw something. “Was it a cloud? It was very low at first, and I feared it might evaporate as the sun warmed it.” She asked Josiah what he made of it. “I think it must be the timber on Carson River,” he said.

At that moment one of the lead cattle offered his opinion: a weak, but no longer desperate, lowing sound. Sarah, misunderstanding, expected him to collapse and die. But then the other lead ox emitted a similar sound, and all four animals lifted their heads to sniff the air—and the scent of water it carried.

It was then that Sarah knew they had survived the desert. Reaching the river required hours more; and of course the ramparts of the Sierras remained. But young Mary wouldn’t lose her parents, nor her parents Mary, on the sands of the Carson Desert.

N
ONE PAID MORE
for ignorance than the party of Lewis Manly. Traveling north toward Salt Lake City, glumly expecting to have to winter among the Mormons, Manly and the others were delighted—and Manly
amazed—to meet a wagon train that included his original partner, Bennett, whom he had missed east of the Missouri. Bennett recounted that he had linked up with a company upon which fell all the troubles of the trail. Cholera had carried off some of the travelers; the survivors quarreled among themselves; the solemn compact to stick together was voided by those who thought they stood a better chance alone. Division reached the point of sheer spite: when one half-owner of a wagon insisted on cutting the vehicle in two (thinking to convert his half into a cart), the other owner agreed, but sawed the wagon in half lengthwise, rendering it unusable to both. The catalog of troubles delayed the train so long that the central route to the diggings would be impassable by the time the Sierras were reached. Bennett and some others determined to angle south, along the road to Los Angeles, which might be traversed all winter.

Manly decided to join them, not least since Bennett still had much of what the two had purchased together. Most of Manly’s partners from the Green River, having no such stake with Bennett and rather less confidence than Manly that Bennett and the others knew where they were going, declined an invitation to come along.

Fresh problems surfaced almost at once. Some members of the group circulated a map purporting to show a shortcut to the goldfields, one that avoided the Sierra passes but entered California much closer to the mines than the Los Angeles route did. The more impatient members of the group, including Manly and Bennett, voted to secede from the main train and attempt the shortcut.

Within days they began to regret their decision. Pastures and water holes marked on the map weren’t where they were supposed to be; ridges and canyons absent from the map blocked the trail. Before long the se- ceders realized they were on their own—not exactly lost, for they knew more or less where they were and where they wanted to go, but without any information as to how to get there, or what lay between them and their goal.

They groped forward. After three days ascending a ridge, they found themselves on the brink of a steep canyon running as far to north and south as they could see. There appeared to be no way to get the wagons
down into the canyon or, once in, to get them out. For days they were stymied; several members lost courage and retreated toward the trail they had left. At last a scouting party reported that it had found a way through the canyon. The route wouldn’t be easy, but neither was it impossible.

Manly and the others set off. The route led north, which troubled Manly, as California was still so far to the west. Until the canyon was behind them, nothing could be done; but when the trail continued north beyond the canyon, he felt obliged to speak up. He told Bennett and the others they must turn west if they ever hoped to reach California. By all indications, the trail they were on simply led back to Salt Lake City. A council was called, the case was heard, and Manly’s motion carried. Leaving the northbound track, the party turned left toward the trackless west.